A Blanket for the Alps: Why the World Must Look Over the Melting of Himalayan Glaciers

By Engineer Arshad H Abbasi & Malik Khuda Bakhsh Awan, former Inspector General (IG) of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) Police and additional IG positions in Punjab

This summer, on 200 square metres of Switzerland’s Tsanfleuron Glacier, four master’s students and a firm called Fisolan tried something almost quaint: they covered part of a melting glacier in sheep’s wool. The “Keep It Wool” project, run with the Summit Foundation and the University of Lausanne, found that biodegradable wool blankets slowed summer ice loss about as well as the synthetic geotextiles skiers and glaciologists have used for years — without shedding plastic microfibres into the meltwater. Switzerland discards 40 to 70 percent of its wool annually, so the idea has a pleasing circularity: waste fibre saving vanishing ice.

It is a lovely experiment. It is also a rounding error. Tsanfleuron itself is a modest glacier, roughly 3.5 kilometres long. Even if wool blankets were rolled out across every shrinking glacier in the Alps, the intervention covers only a sliver of the roughly 0.02 percent of Swiss glacier ice that pilot projects like this have managed to shield. The Alps, magnificent as they are, hold a fraction of the world’s mountain ice.

Now look east. The Siachen Glacier, sitting in the Karakoram arm of the Himalayas between India and Pakistan, stretches some 70 to 76 kilometres — twenty times the length of Tsanfleuron — with a width of up to eight kilometres and an estimated mean ice thickness approaching 300 metres. Its total glacial system, counting tributaries, spans roughly 700 square kilometres. This is not a ski resort. It is one of the largest reservoirs of fresh water outside the polar caps, feeding the Nubra and ultimately the Indus river system that sustains hundreds of millions of people downstream. Comparing the Alps’ glacial mass to the Himalaya-Karakoram’s is comparing a garden pond to a lake. And yet the world’s engineering ingenuity, funding, and headlines have gone overwhelmingly toward the pond.

Part of the reason Siachen melts faster than it should has nothing to do with global temperatures alone. Since 1984, Indian and Pakistani troops have faced off along the Saltoro Ridge in the world’s highest-altitude military standoff — soldiers, helicopters, fixed cantonments, fuel dumps and, by some accounts, thousands of tonnes of waste sitting directly on the ice. Pakistani water and energy expert Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi has spent close to two decades arguing, in reports for the World Wildlife Fund, the Pakistan Meteorological Department, and open letters to Pakistan’s leadership, that this militarisation — not climate change alone — is accelerating Siachen’s retreat, even as the nearby Baltoro Glacier, largely free of army camps, has held steady or gained mass. Whether or not one accepts that military activity is the dominant driver, Abbasi’s core proposal deserves far more attention than it has received: convert Siachen into a demilitarised transboundary peace park, a proposal he first raised in the Stanford Environmental Law Journal in 2006 and has renewed year after year since, through seminars, WWF-backed studies, government submissions, and open letters to Pakistan’s highest offices, including its Deputy Prime Minister and its president.

There is something genuinely tragic in this. For close to twenty years, one engineer has done, essentially alone and largely at his own initiative, the work that an entire state apparatus should have owned: documenting the glacier’s retreat, naming the causes, proposing a legally grounded path to demilitarisation, and warning — repeatedly, in writing, to the people with the authority to act — that Pakistan’s water security is draining away with the ice. And for close to twenty years, the response from the Government of Pakistan has been, by his own account, largely silence. No sustained funding, no diplomatic push, no institutional backing behind a proposal that would cost the state nothing but political will and could save it a river system. Abbasi has called that silence, in his own words, an unforgivable crime. It is hard to read two decades of unanswered letters and not agree that a country is watching its most vital natural asset disappear while the one person building a serious case to save it works without the government’s help, not with it. Both India and Pakistan have already paid an extraordinary human cost for holding this ice — thousands of soldiers on both sides have died there, more from frostbite, altitude sickness and avalanches than from combat. A peace park would end that toll while giving the glacier a chance to simply be a glacier again — if either government ever chooses to listen.

It is worth saying plainly, too, that the architecture meant to fund glacier protection and climate adaptation in Pakistan has largely failed on its own terms — and failed in a way that stands in stark contrast to one unfunded engineer’s two decades of work. UN agencies, UNDP and UNEP among them, channel much of their Pakistan-based glacier and climate money through local NGOs, and the pattern is by now depressingly familiar: a colourful report, a launch event, a delegation dispatched to a foreign conference, a photograph with a minister — and then nothing that can be pointed to on the ground. No glacier is measurably better protected. No community is measurably more water-secure. No independent, publicly available impact assessment shows these programmes changed anything at all. What they have reliably produced is glossy paper and air miles, not ice saved or rivers secured. And when Pakistan’s own Auditor General has sought to examine where this money actually went, these same organisations have routinely resisted the audit. An engineer working largely alone has produced more usable analysis, more concrete proposals, and more international recognition of Siachen’s plight than the entire aid-funded NGO ecosystem built explicitly to protect it. That is not a coincidence; it is an indictment.

Which brings us back to wool, and to an older, cheaper idea — one South Asians themselves worked out almost 150 years ago. Commercial ice manufacturing arrived in the subcontinent in the 1870s — the International Ice Company opened in Madras in 1874, the Bengal Ice Company followed in Calcutta in 1878 — and the ice trade of that era routinely packed and covered ice blocks in jute sacking to slow their melt during transport and storage across a tropical subcontinent with no refrigeration. That is not a modern innovation dressed up as heritage; it is a documented, working 19th-century technology, developed and used in this region a century and a half before a Swiss university thought to try sheep’s wool on the Alps. Jute is biodegradable, locally abundant across Bengal, and far cheaper to produce at scale than Swiss wool. If 19th-century ice merchants could keep blocks of ice from melting on ships and in warehouses across a South Asian summer using nothing more than jute sacking, there is no serious reason the same fibre, engineered and scaled appropriately, could not help shield sections of Himalayan ice today. We do not need to import a Swiss solution. We already own an older and cheaper one; we have simply forgotten to use it.

The stakes are not abstract, and they should frighten anyone who bothers to look at the numbers. The Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalayan ranges together hold the largest concentration of ice on the planet outside the two poles — over 63,700 glaciers, by ICIMOD’s count, spread across roughly 55,800 square kilometres. Even under the most optimistic path the world is currently on, the region’s own scientists project this ice will lose a third of its volume by 2100; under high emissions, up to two-thirds to 80 percent could be gone. This is not a distant, theoretical loss. It is happening now, twice as fast as it was in 2000, and it is described by the researchers who study it as largely irreversible. Nearly two billion people across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, China and Myanmar depend on the ten river systems — the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra chief among them — that this ice feeds. When it goes, it does not just raise oceans somewhere far away; it first destroys the seasonal water supply of a fifth of the human race, then compounds that catastrophe by adding its meltwater to a global sea that is already rising.

And that global sea will rise over 1.5 meters if all Himalayan and Karakoram glaciers melt toward coastlines that cannot absorb the blow. Glacier and ice-sheet melt worldwide is already responsible for a substantial share of observed sea-level rise, and current trajectories put the world on course for more than a metre of rise by 2100 if emissions are not brought under control. Every centimetre of that rise is measured in cities, not statistics. Low-lying, densely populated coastal capitals and mega-cities — Dhaka, Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi, Jakarta, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Lagos, Miami, and swaths of Shanghai and Guangzhou among them — sit on land that is only a metre or two above current sea level, and every one of them draws water from, or lies downstream of, a river system fed in part by Hindu Kush-Himalayan ice. It should alarm the world that the glaciers most likely to fail first, and fastest, are also sitting directly beneath an active war zone. Some researchers who have studied the region, including Abbasi, have also raised concerns that rapid deglaciation may be linked to shifting stresses on the crust beneath the ice — a hypothesis that remains contested and unproven rather than settled science, but one that underscores how much about this fragile, overstressed system we still do not understand, and how little margin for error we have left to find out.

What is not contested is this: the Himalayas hold vastly more ice than the Alps, host one of the world’s longest-running military standoffs directly atop that ice, and receive a fraction of the global attention and honest funding that Alpine glaciers enjoy. The global community should applaud Switzerland’s wool experiment — and then ask why nobody has tried jute on Siachen. It should fund Himalayan glacier science directly and transparently, insist on audits of every rupee routed through Pakistani NGOs, and take the two-decade-old call seriously, championed by one of us, Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi and others, to demilitarise Siachen and place the Himalayan glaciers under UNESCO protection.

So this is our final appeal, made plainly and urgently: if the world is not yet ready to fully demilitarise Siachen, if UNESCO protection is still years of diplomacy away, then at the very least, cover the glaciers with jute. Start now, start small if necessary, but start. It is cheap. It is biodegradable. It is not a foreign import but a South Asian technique proven across nearly a century and a half of use, sitting idle while the ice above the Indus disappears one summer at a time. Do not wait for another glossy report or another well-funded conference panel to rediscover what ice merchants in Calcutta and Madras already knew in the 1870s. Do not wait for the day two billion people wake up to find their rivers running dry in the spring and their coastal cities flooding in the same decade — a cruel double blow the glaciers themselves are quietly preparing to deliver. The ice that feeds a fifth of humanity deserves at least as much care as the ice that feeds Swiss ski season — and it deserves it now, in jute, on the mountain, not someday, on paper, in a conference hall.